When Coffee Goes Crunch

“You’re going to love these cookies!” Leah yelled over the whir of the electric mixer. “But I can’t give you the recipe, so don’t ask. It’s a secret.” I don’t have many pet peeves, but among them, the concept of the secret recipe sits near the top of the list. There’s nothing worse than falling in love with a cake at a potluck, let’s say, or a risotto at a dinner party, only to find that the person who made it won’t part with the recipe. I’ve cried over much less, to tell you the truth. But it was a sunny Friday afternoon in late June, the kind of day that makes it hard to complain about much of anything, and my friend Leah had just flown in from California to spend a few days in Seattle, hiking and relaxing with me and my husband. I was not about to argue with her—especially not when she had spontaneously offered, only three hours after landing, to bake cookies for me. There was no sense in picking a fight.

The recipe, Leah told me, tearing into a bag of chocolate chips, had been passed down from her maternal grandmother, Mamie Chaiffetz. Mamie came from a strong lineage where flour, sugar, and leavening were concerned: Her father had been a baker in the Russian cavalry, and he and his wife later owned a bakery in Philadelphia.

“Mamie called these Coffee Crunch Bars,” Leah said. “But to me, they almost taste like toffee. And the best part is, they’re easy. That’s why I can’t give you the recipe, actually: because they taste so good that I don’t want anyone to know how ridiculously easy they are.”

The recipe as Mamie made it, Leah explained, was a one-bowl, one-pan affair. In a mixing bowl, she would stir together soft butter, dark brown sugar, almond extract, instant espresso powder, flour, baking powder, salt, sliced almonds, and chocolate chips. Then she would press the dough onto a rimmed baking sheet, bake it, and slice it into bars. They were delicious—crunchy and crumbly and a little messy, nubbly with nuts and chocolate. Mamie shared the recipe with her daughter Rachel, who in turn taught it to her own daughter, Leah.

Of course, Leah, being the descendant of so many skilled bakers, took her grandmother’s recipe and made it even better—by accident. One winter a couple of years ago, she offered to bake a few cookies for a friend’s concert. The task turned out to be a daunting one—she learned that she would need 350 cookies—and in a rush to get them finished in time, she made a fortuitous mistake with the Coffee Crunch Bars. Rather than tossing all the ingredients into a bowl together, she began by creaming the butter and brown sugar separately. The resulting bars were crisper and more even-textured, with a deeper, more persistent toffee flavor. Much to her surprise, Leah confided as she popped a nub of dough into her mouth, she liked them even better than Mamie’s. Since that fateful day, she has never gone back.

Reaching into the bowl, she pinched off a small wad of dough and handed it to me. The dough was thick and dense, the color of a caffè latte, flecked with almonds and bits of chocolate. It smelled like brown sugar and espresso and sweet butter, and it tasted even better. Using her hands, Leah pressed it onto a baking sheet and then slid it into the oven. As it baked, the dough darkened to a handsome shade of milk chocolate, filling the kitchen with successive waves of scents: now melting butter, now freshly brewed coffee, now old-fashioned toffee. I busied myself with washing dishes to keep from pacing in front of the oven.

When it was firm to the touch and baked through, Leah cut the soft, still-hot dough into bars and lifted them gently to a wire rack. They would crisp as they cooled. And while we waited, she suggested, we could eat the “cribbly bits,” the crumbs and shards left behind in the pan.

“Those are the absolute tastiest part,” she explained. “And everyone knows that because they’re not actual bites, they have no caloric value.” If I didn’t love Leah already, I certainly did now.

By some miracle of willpower—also known as distraction in the form of a bowl of olives and a bottle of rosé—we managed to keep ourselves away from the rack of cookies until after dinner. But once we started eating them, it was almost impossible to stop. They were thin and buttery, crunchy to the tooth but melty on the tongue, each bite giving way to a rush of complex, sophisticated flavors, a melding of espresso, chocolate, and toffee. They were the best cookies I had ever tasted. Even though we had put away a full dinner of ratatouille, lamb sausages, and roasted potatoes, we ate almost half the batch. I swore I would get the recipe before the weekend was through.

And in the meantime, I would eat as many cookies as I possibly could. When we drove down to Mt. Rainier for a day of hiking and picnicking to celebrate the start of summer, I stashed a container of leftover cookies in my backpack. As it would happen, it was raining on the mountain, and our chosen hiking trail was completely covered with an unseasonable, almost Twilight Zone-esque eight feet of snow, but we did manage to picnic in the car, which was really all that mattered. Plus, there were the Coffee Crunch Bars. I may have thought they were delicious after a civilized dinner indoors, but their dark, warming flavor was even better suited, I found, to a chilly afternoon in the car. I only wished I had a cup of coffee to drink with them—and that I could get the recipe.

The next morning, over a breakfast of toast and strawberry jam before taking Leah to the airport, I decided to play hardball. I am not usually the bribing type, but I was getting desperate, so I did what I had to do: I pulled out the only ammunition I had. Might seeing her cookies on the pages of this magazine, I offered, be a fair exchange for surrendering the recipe? Leah took a bite of toast and smiled. I think you know her answer.

Molly Wizenberg is behind the award-winning blog Orangette. She is working on her forthcoming culinary memoir, A Homemade Life. Find more of her columns from Bon Appétit in the full archive of The Cooking Life.